Effects of Implicit and Explicit Instruction on Morphological Awareness and Knowledge

In the present study, we explored how implicit and explicit learning affects L2 learners’ morphological awareness and knowledge. To this end, 10th grade high school students (N = 170) in Korea were assigned to one of the three conditions: implicit learning, explicit learning, and control. Participants in the implicit condition learned the meaning of derivatives containing target derivational morphemes (e.g,, sub-) and distractor words, whereas their counterparts in the explicit condition learned the same lexical items and also received morphological instructions. Next, morphological awareness and knowledge was measured by using one- and seven-week delayed post-tests. Overall results revealed superiority of explicit learning over the other two conditions in all post-tests. Results also revealed that although implicit learning may enhance morphological awareness and knowledge to a statistically significant degree, the magnitude of effects computed by Cohen’s d showed small or medium-sized effects. Given that the present study is the first to explore the impact of implicit and explicit learning on morphological awareness and knowledge in EFL settings, the present findings may make important contributions to current second language acquisition literature.